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Moving Forward On Lincoln's Retreat
By Linda Hales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page C01
For a quarter of Abraham Lincoln's presidency, while the Civil War raged, the beleaguered commander in chief commuted daily, often on horseback, to a bucolic cottage at the Soldiers' Home. The cares of office followed him to what was then a country retreat, and he likely drafted the Emancipation Proclamation there by flickering lamplight. But the third-highest hilltop in the capital region was not far enough from the steamy swamp of politics. As the story is told, Lincoln was headed home one night without a cavalry escort when an unknown marksman put a bullet through the president's top hat.
Lincoln spent three summers in residence at the home, 1862 to 1864. Only one visit was recorded in winter -- an exploratory trip with his wife, Mary, days after his inauguration -- so he may never have seen the place covered with snow, as dignitaries including Mayor Anthony Williams did yesterday. A blanket of white makes the drab gray shell of a house -- all that remains of the Lincoln idyll -- seem less forlorn amid the scaffolding.
"We think this is one of the most important historical sites being restored in America today," said Richard L. Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and a prime mover in saving the house.
Restoration has been on the agenda since 2000, when the Gothic revival-style cottage and 2.3 acres were declared the President Lincoln and Soldiers' Home National Monument. The same year, the National Trust put the cottage atop its list of 11 Most Endangered Historic Sites. Since then, $3.5 million has been raised of the $11.5 million required to restore the structure and establish a tourist destination and scholarly Lincoln study center. Moe says an additional $1.5 million was promised in the new federal budget. Last year's appropriation of $2.3 million cleared the way for exterior renovation, which began this month.
Yesterday, at an event designed to raise the project's profile, a representative of cable channel HGTV handed over a symbolic check for $75,000. A segment on the Lincoln Cottage restoration will be broadcast Wednesday and Feb. 22, according to an HGTV spokesman, and 60-second public service spots will air all month long.
The house is in dire straits. On a recent tour with Peter Carmichael, the newly hired director of the Lincoln Cottage, trust project manager Sophia Lynn led the way through a deconstruction zone, from the old summer kitchen up the bare stairs to a warren of third-floor rooms under the gables. In the 140 years since the Lincolns departed, the house has been used as a dormitory and office building. Swaths of linoleum and industrial green carpet cover the floor. Squirrels are resident despite traps baited with peanut butter. Sprinkler pipes outnumber fine millwork. Here and there, researchers have exposed floorboards and bored through plaster walls to reacquaint themselves with the original structure.
"We're peeling away the structure to learn more about the artifact," Lynn says.
Gas pipes attest to once-fashionable gas lamps. Suggestions of decorative paint have been discovered. Pocket doors between first-floor salons took several people half a day to free up and close, probably for the first time in 100 years. Marble mantels are undamaged. But only one coffered ceiling, in a paneled room believed to have been a library, survives from the bygone era.
Moe keeps a photo of the house, which is owned by the Armed Forces Retirement Home, on the wall of his Massachusetts Avenue office. He refers to the property as "a 19th-century Camp David" and hopes it will one day do for Lincoln "what Monticello has done for Thomas Jefferson." The 11,500-square-foot house began life in 1842 as the country house of banker George Washington Riggs, whose partner, William W. Corcoran, had an estate nearby. The Riggs design is based on a model from Andrew Jackson Downing's 19th-century book "Cottage Residences." Architecturally, it's not Monticello, but Gretchen Pfaehler, an architect on the restoration team, calls it "a great cottage."
Riggs moved back to the city in 1850 and the government took over, setting up a progressive residence for disabled veterans on 320 green acres. Officers occupied the main house and built two other cottages. To assure funding, presidents and secretaries of war were invited to spend summers on the grounds. President Buchanan spent a holiday there and is believed to have recommended the locale to the Lincolns. There was no Lincoln family vacation in 1861 after the surrender of Fort Sumter and a Union defeat at Bull Run. But the following year, after 12-year-old Willie Lincoln died of typhoid, the president took his wife and younger son, Tad, to the country -- a distance of 31/2 miles.
Lincoln apparently did not express feelings about the cottage in writing. Most of what is known of the experience comes from historian Matthew Pinsker, who researched the Lincoln "occupancy" for the National Trust. His book, "Lincoln's Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers' Home," is a recollection drawn mostly from soldiers guarding the president, favor seekers who gained audiences and visiting officials who kept diaries. War was inescapable. Confederate cannons fired within earshot. Thousands of fresh graves were dug for Union soldiers in full view of the cottage window. Lincoln is described invariably as a disheveled man in slippers who slept badly, read poetry and wandered the property after dark.
To devise a plan for the restoration of the structure, the National Trust called in Hillier Architecture, a firm that is also working on the U.S. Supreme Court. Architect George Skarmeas, who heads the firm's historic preservation practice, says that lack of documentation has challenged the experts. But an 1860 image of the exterior has been adopted as a model. It shows a much more modest porch than the likable wraparound structure in the photo hanging in Moe's office -- and shown in the HGTV segment. After architects ascertained that the structure was unstable, it was disassembled. This summer, a more historically correct porch will be built.
As for the interior, no photographs or descriptions have been found. That makes it impossible to determine how the rooms -- there are 14 now -- were furnished or where Lincoln slept or worked. Pinsker adds to the mystery by suggesting that the Lincolns may have spent the first two summers in another cottage on the property. He cites a letter to a House committee chairman in 1864, the last year the Lincolns were in residence, seeking to justify the cost of decorating "a new cottage for the Lincolns."
A vestibule, library and salon likely will be restored to some degree. But there will be no attempt to create a furnished domestic scene. In some respects, that's a shame. Mary Lincoln was the Nancy Reagan of her day, buying furniture and china with relish, but also taste. She was known to frequent the best sources in New York for cushions, lace curtains, silk tassels and more. No inventories of furnishings for the cottage have surfaced. But one autumn, the Lincolns returned to the White House with 19 loads of furniture.
Skarmeas admits to a certain level of frustration. "You are talking about an enormous figure, someone who was linked in the strongest way possible to some of the most significant milestones in American history," he says. "I wish we had a crystal ball and would be able to see what happened. I wish that someone would step forward and say, 'I have the photographs.' "
Moving Forward On Lincoln's Retreat
By Linda Hales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page C01
For a quarter of Abraham Lincoln's presidency, while the Civil War raged, the beleaguered commander in chief commuted daily, often on horseback, to a bucolic cottage at the Soldiers' Home. The cares of office followed him to what was then a country retreat, and he likely drafted the Emancipation Proclamation there by flickering lamplight. But the third-highest hilltop in the capital region was not far enough from the steamy swamp of politics. As the story is told, Lincoln was headed home one night without a cavalry escort when an unknown marksman put a bullet through the president's top hat.
Lincoln spent three summers in residence at the home, 1862 to 1864. Only one visit was recorded in winter -- an exploratory trip with his wife, Mary, days after his inauguration -- so he may never have seen the place covered with snow, as dignitaries including Mayor Anthony Williams did yesterday. A blanket of white makes the drab gray shell of a house -- all that remains of the Lincoln idyll -- seem less forlorn amid the scaffolding.
"We think this is one of the most important historical sites being restored in America today," said Richard L. Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and a prime mover in saving the house.
Restoration has been on the agenda since 2000, when the Gothic revival-style cottage and 2.3 acres were declared the President Lincoln and Soldiers' Home National Monument. The same year, the National Trust put the cottage atop its list of 11 Most Endangered Historic Sites. Since then, $3.5 million has been raised of the $11.5 million required to restore the structure and establish a tourist destination and scholarly Lincoln study center. Moe says an additional $1.5 million was promised in the new federal budget. Last year's appropriation of $2.3 million cleared the way for exterior renovation, which began this month.
Yesterday, at an event designed to raise the project's profile, a representative of cable channel HGTV handed over a symbolic check for $75,000. A segment on the Lincoln Cottage restoration will be broadcast Wednesday and Feb. 22, according to an HGTV spokesman, and 60-second public service spots will air all month long.
The house is in dire straits. On a recent tour with Peter Carmichael, the newly hired director of the Lincoln Cottage, trust project manager Sophia Lynn led the way through a deconstruction zone, from the old summer kitchen up the bare stairs to a warren of third-floor rooms under the gables. In the 140 years since the Lincolns departed, the house has been used as a dormitory and office building. Swaths of linoleum and industrial green carpet cover the floor. Squirrels are resident despite traps baited with peanut butter. Sprinkler pipes outnumber fine millwork. Here and there, researchers have exposed floorboards and bored through plaster walls to reacquaint themselves with the original structure.
"We're peeling away the structure to learn more about the artifact," Lynn says.
Gas pipes attest to once-fashionable gas lamps. Suggestions of decorative paint have been discovered. Pocket doors between first-floor salons took several people half a day to free up and close, probably for the first time in 100 years. Marble mantels are undamaged. But only one coffered ceiling, in a paneled room believed to have been a library, survives from the bygone era.
Moe keeps a photo of the house, which is owned by the Armed Forces Retirement Home, on the wall of his Massachusetts Avenue office. He refers to the property as "a 19th-century Camp David" and hopes it will one day do for Lincoln "what Monticello has done for Thomas Jefferson." The 11,500-square-foot house began life in 1842 as the country house of banker George Washington Riggs, whose partner, William W. Corcoran, had an estate nearby. The Riggs design is based on a model from Andrew Jackson Downing's 19th-century book "Cottage Residences." Architecturally, it's not Monticello, but Gretchen Pfaehler, an architect on the restoration team, calls it "a great cottage."
Riggs moved back to the city in 1850 and the government took over, setting up a progressive residence for disabled veterans on 320 green acres. Officers occupied the main house and built two other cottages. To assure funding, presidents and secretaries of war were invited to spend summers on the grounds. President Buchanan spent a holiday there and is believed to have recommended the locale to the Lincolns. There was no Lincoln family vacation in 1861 after the surrender of Fort Sumter and a Union defeat at Bull Run. But the following year, after 12-year-old Willie Lincoln died of typhoid, the president took his wife and younger son, Tad, to the country -- a distance of 31/2 miles.
Lincoln apparently did not express feelings about the cottage in writing. Most of what is known of the experience comes from historian Matthew Pinsker, who researched the Lincoln "occupancy" for the National Trust. His book, "Lincoln's Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers' Home," is a recollection drawn mostly from soldiers guarding the president, favor seekers who gained audiences and visiting officials who kept diaries. War was inescapable. Confederate cannons fired within earshot. Thousands of fresh graves were dug for Union soldiers in full view of the cottage window. Lincoln is described invariably as a disheveled man in slippers who slept badly, read poetry and wandered the property after dark.
To devise a plan for the restoration of the structure, the National Trust called in Hillier Architecture, a firm that is also working on the U.S. Supreme Court. Architect George Skarmeas, who heads the firm's historic preservation practice, says that lack of documentation has challenged the experts. But an 1860 image of the exterior has been adopted as a model. It shows a much more modest porch than the likable wraparound structure in the photo hanging in Moe's office -- and shown in the HGTV segment. After architects ascertained that the structure was unstable, it was disassembled. This summer, a more historically correct porch will be built.
As for the interior, no photographs or descriptions have been found. That makes it impossible to determine how the rooms -- there are 14 now -- were furnished or where Lincoln slept or worked. Pinsker adds to the mystery by suggesting that the Lincolns may have spent the first two summers in another cottage on the property. He cites a letter to a House committee chairman in 1864, the last year the Lincolns were in residence, seeking to justify the cost of decorating "a new cottage for the Lincolns."
A vestibule, library and salon likely will be restored to some degree. But there will be no attempt to create a furnished domestic scene. In some respects, that's a shame. Mary Lincoln was the Nancy Reagan of her day, buying furniture and china with relish, but also taste. She was known to frequent the best sources in New York for cushions, lace curtains, silk tassels and more. No inventories of furnishings for the cottage have surfaced. But one autumn, the Lincolns returned to the White House with 19 loads of furniture.
Skarmeas admits to a certain level of frustration. "You are talking about an enormous figure, someone who was linked in the strongest way possible to some of the most significant milestones in American history," he says. "I wish we had a crystal ball and would be able to see what happened. I wish that someone would step forward and say, 'I have the photographs.' "